Hello all,
I've written a backup utility, it's currently still in 'beta' but I think I've worked out most of the bugs and it's been working very well for me, so I thought I'd share my work with the community. 
I'll be trying to update it fairly regularly, hot-clone of a VM or specific VMDK attached to a VM planned for next version.
Please see the readme file here for some initial instructions: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~alexm/README
You can download the utility here:
http://xtravirt.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=75&func=select&id=5
Once you've extracted the archive, please read the README file in the directory created for instructions on using the utility.
Any problems post them to this thread and I'll try and resolve them, I'll set up a proper website when I have the time.
Alex
p.s. Big thanks to acr for help with testing!
Added link to the latest release - 21st May 2007[/b]
Message was edited by:
MR-T: Updated with link to Xtravirt site
Sorry about not testing much, I've been traveling. Look for an email later week And so far it works well !
Hmm that's an interesting point, perhaps the script should just check if there is already an instance running already, and if there is, refuse to run?
I'm slightly nervous about automatically terminating processes from a menu option, although I could put it in fairly easily.
If you need to terminate a backup job early for any reason you can do so as follows:
ps aux | grep vi-backup[/code]
Find the PID for vi-backup.
That should terminate any existing backup, note that if a disk is currently being exported it will be completed but no further exports will be made, you will also need to remove 'Scripted Backup Snapshots' from any VMs that had a backup terminated half way though using the vi-client.
Version 0.8.5 will be out in the next week, with a menu option to hot clone VMs, and a few bug fixes related to DRS migrations and logging, and lock files so two instances of the script don't attempt to backup a VM simultaneously. I'll try and work something into it related to existing processes too.
Thanks for the suggestion, glad you found the script useful.
It doesn't use vcbMounter to do the exports, couple of reasons I chose not to use it - firstly I found it to be unreliable at removing snapshots - so I decided to deal with them myself and use vmkfstools to export the disks. Secondly this way you also end up with instantly usable exported VMDKs, you don't need to use vcbRestore and the catalog file to restore the VMs - this opens other options like the ability to clone VM/specific VMDKs etc.
So, the reason snapshotted VMs are excluded is that I'd have to write a load of logic into the script to find existing snapshot files/.vmsd and export them as well as the base VMDK, and this would also complicate the automatic restore of VMs massivley as I'd have to make sure I re-imported the deltas properly and that the correct delta was in use.
I may have a crack at dealing with VMs with existing snapshots at some point but it's not a small a task.
Hope it's useful to you anyway.
